Elizabeth Irving

Who was Elizabeth Irving?

Dorothea Elizabeth Irving, Lady Brunner, OBE, JP was a British actress, the daughter of actors H. B. Irving and Dorothea Baird, and the granddaughter of Victorian era stage star Henry Irving. Her older brother was the Hollywood set designer and art director Laurence Irving. Elizabeth Irving was the Chairman of the National Federation of Women's Institutes and in 1955 founded the Keep Britain Tidy Group, acting as President of the Group for 19 years from 1966.

Born at 1 Upper Woburn Place, London, in 1904, Dorothea Elizabeth Irving usually went by her middle name of Elizabeth. She was educated at home, at South Hampstead High School and, when the family moved to Oxford in 1916, at Oxford High School, before moving to Wycombe Abbey School. Irving left school at 16 to study acting in Oxford and London, making her stage debut aged 12 in The Bells, in which her father had a leading role. Her early roles as an adult actress were as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in Henrik Ibsen's The Pretenders and in George du Maurier's Trilby. She also had a role in A. V. Bramble's silent film version of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley.

She married Sir Felix John Morgan Brunner, 3rd Bt., a businessman and the son of Sir John Fowler Brunner, 2nd Bt. and Lucy Marianne Vaughan Morgan, on 8 July 1926. They had five sons. After her marriage Irving gave up acting, and became Lady Brunner in 1929 on the death of her husband's father, the 2nd baronet. She held the office of Justice of the Peace for Oxfordshire in 1946. In 1937 they bought Greys Court in Oxfordshire, and donated the house to the National Trust in 1969 but continued to live there.